


Biology Will Tell

by IShouldBeWriting



Series: Mission: Ashkelon [6]
Category: Singularity North
Genre: Community: 31_days, Dead People, Gen, Sometimes The Facts Are Hard To Swallow, The Future, Weird Biology, pet theories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-12
Updated: 2013-06-12
Packaged: 2017-12-14 19:11:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/840376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IShouldBeWriting/pseuds/IShouldBeWriting
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They’d suspected it all along but still, Colonel David Colby would really rather that MO Garrett Byrne’s findings had dis-proven that particular pet theory.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Biology Will Tell

“He was what?!?!” Colonel David Colby shouted.

“Not entirely human, sir,” Dr Byrne repeated the words again. To his credit, they came out as evenly as if he hadn’t just been yelled at by one of his senior officers, but then, that was Garrett; unflappable.

“Would you care to explain that statement, doctor?” Colby responded, his tone as even and measured as the doctor’s was. 

_That’s not a good sign,_ Garrett thought. Taking a moment, he tried to organize his thoughts into a format that would be the least likely to get his head bitten off by his OC. Despite working with TEAR, it was still a rare thing in his line of work to encounter something that was the stuff of science fiction. But he’d double and triple checked his findings, had McKenna and some of the other techs run the samples through their equipment without any advance warning of what he expected them to find. No, the answer remained the same. The man hadn’t been human. At least, not entirely.

“The good news, sir, is that this is confirmation of the theory. Unless one of the black ops divisions has been experimenting without anyone getting wind of it, we can now be absolutely certain that this man was from the future.”

On the other end of the video conference, Colonel Colby grimaced and rummaged through a desk drawer to produce what Garrett anticipated would be a bottle of scotch. He wasn’t disappointed.

Watching as his OC poured a generous slug into his coffee, Garrett continued. “It’s subtle but once I knew what I was looking for, the patterns became easier to find. It’s not nanotech, or at least, not precisely. But he’s got machines, ones grown biologically from his own cells, that permeate almost every major system in his body. They’re duplicating the tasks already performed by his body. It’s like a set of backup circuitry running in parallel. But they’re too perfect, these little organic machines. That’s how we finally caught them. No matter how much we’d prefer to think otherwise, the human body is inherently an imperfect thing. A slight variance in cell size and shape here, the flipping of a DNA pair there, we’re riddled with inconsistencies. But these? These little buggers are perfect. Every one of them is a carbon copy of the next. The human body just doesn’t do that. And they’re resistant as well. Resistant to disease, to aging, and a whole host of other things. No, these things are microscopic bits of manufactured biology. And that doesn’t exist in our world. At least, _not yet_. Ergo, what I have laying on the slab in my morgue is proof; this man and his companion were from the future.”

“Bollocks,” Colby muttered quietly.


End file.
